Seconded. The failings are especially good - they give you a meaty, fleshy hands on on the sharp edges the Falcon-1 project had. And make the eventual triumph so much more spectacular. And - not to denigrate the original effort in any way - the book also demonstrates how amazing it was they scaled from "run-of-the mill" light Falcon-1 booster to a pure sci-fi reusable Falcon-9 platform in a matter of few years.

there's also a recipe for Turkish Goulash in the back :)

I just finished it last week, pretty amazing. Man, i feel for those kids stuck on Omelek tring to get Falcon1 in the air with Musk tearing into them on each failure. In my 20s I would have been naive enough to do it too though. Heh, thank god for youth.

It remained a complete mystery to me how they implemented all of the control systems without flying the vehicle single time. Now I know a thing called 'dynamic control' exists but still feels unfathomable - you build a rocket - and then without any testflights - it actually flies where you program it to?

The book mentioned "simulations" a couple times. I would love to know who wrote the simulation.

edit: maybe "simulation" was ksp and the wrote their flight controller as a plugin haha

Despite having Elon Musk in the subtitle it's as much about several other key SpaceX personnel as it is about Musk. It's awesome.